1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing system and a management method thereof, and more particularly, to an information processing system and a management method thereof capable of effectively utilizing resources in data transmission processes executed by a plurality of control units.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent deployment of multi-core processors or the like, it has become common that a single apparatus is controlled by a plurality of control units (processors). If the control unit is single, resources mounted on an apparatus, such as memory areas or hardware devices, can be inevitably uniformly managed by the control unit.
However, when the control unit becomes plural, it is necessary to distribute resources to be allocated to the respective control units. Therefore, a so-called distribution loss may occur in which a resource needed by an apparatus is assigned to another control unit and thus cannot be used.
As a typical conventional countermeasure to the distribution loss, a method of committing a process to another control unit when the resources fell short (reference should be made to, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-120014) is provided.
However, in a contents delivery apparatus that delivers a large amount of data such as video or audio streams, the conventional method cannot solely eliminate or alleviate the distribution loss due to the following problems.
As a first problem, since the contents delivery apparatus is configured to transmit video data preliminarily stored in the disk drive to a network, when the read performance of a disk is not sufficient, it is difficult to eliminate resource shortage unless the video data is replicated to another disk. That is, when the resources fell short, since it is very difficult to obtain resources for eliminating the resource shortage, the resource distribution loss cannot be eliminated.
As a second problem, when the whole contents are preliminarily stored in the entire disk drives in order to solve the first problem, since the data size of the video contents is generally large, it may result in waste (distribution loss) of disk capacity. Particularly, since the popularity (access frequency) of the video contents greatly depends on its title and varies with time, it is difficult to accurately estimate access concentration to specific contents in advance.
That is, in the prior art or combination thereof, particularly, when a large amount of data such as video or audio streams is delivered by an apparatus having a number of control units such as a multi-core processor, it is difficult to eliminate the resource distribution loss caused by distributing the resources to the respective control units.